Super Ultra Dead Rising 3 Arcade Remix Hyper Edition EX plus Alpha (REVIEW)
written Justin Prince (@prince_justin)
A ridiculous premise with an even more ridiculously long name, but sometimes we as gamers need to not take things so seriously and just... run with it. Enter Super Ultra Dead Rising 3 Arcade Remix Hyper Edition EX plus Alpha, a follow up DLC that adds a brand new mode to the already stellar Dead Rising 3 that launched with the Xbox One this past holiday season.
Up to four players can traverse four different districts, completing objectives and that range from killing X number of zombies to destroying bombs littered all over the city. At its core, this is a super light hearted (as if the Dead Rising series wasn't light hearted enough already) arcade mode. At the start you can pick from one of four heroes, Dead Rising 3's Nick and Annie return along with Dead Rising 2's Chuck and the original hero himself... Mister Frank West. The ridiculousness continues when the foursome decide to conquer the zombie invasion... with the POWER of COSPLAY! Each character has a secondary costume (complete with different attacks) and three cosplay costumes from the extensive backlog of Capcom properties. Nick can don Ryu's outfit from the Street Fighter series (complete with hadouken) or dip his toes into a very revealing cross-play by wearing the barely-there costume of Darkstalker's Felicia. Other major Capcom mainstays like Soki from Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams (worn by Frank) and even Regina from Dino Crisis (worn by Annie) make an appearance, noticeably absent is anything Resident Evil related... perhaps they felt the two series were too similar, but honestly I'm glad they didn't go the easy route... otherwise we may never have gotten the chance to see Frank West get totes kawaii in a B.B. Hood cosplay.
As I mentioned earlier, the open world of Dead Rising 3 is split into four distinct districts within each district you have to complete five rounds to clear the stage. The objectives in each round are simple enough but come with a good amount of variation to keep it from feeling stale. You can try to power through it solo, but from my experience I barely got past the second round of the first district before failing. The game is truly meant to be played amongst friends, more so when you haven't unlocked the more powerful costumes yet. Personally, I lucked out. I met these two guys online that were adamant in helping me unlock the more powerful costumes! One of the most cumbersome tasks was hunting down the arcade machines, there are two arcade machines in each district and by the time I powered through the main game once, I had em all. I would like to give a big shout out and personal thank you to XBL users TheDamienXD and biggunner7 for helping me out! TheDamienXD would show me where the arcade machines were while biggunner7 would help tackle the mission objectives; it's rare to find people online with an attitude like these guys so good karma and vibes definitely should go their way! Anyway, the point is that the game is VERY tough to solo, so either make sure you are willing to play with randoms or get a group of your friends together in a party.
Each character and costume comes complete with a super move, rack up your super meter high enough and in true Street Fighter fashion you can unleash all manner of Capcom-Hell upon unsuspecting dead heads. While some are more powerful than others, it never felt unbalanced, especially when playing with others who understand which character to pick. Personally I was having a blast with Frank's B.B. Hood special and Annie's Chun Li special. You can pick up special weapons along the way but the beauty of this being an arcade mode is the default weapon your character carries never craps out. One minor gripe I noticed was that the frame rate would stutter at times during some of the more graphically heavy supers, I don't know if this affected the games of those I played with, but I did notice it on my end. Gameplay is more or less the same as the vanilla game (save for having to collect/build weapons and vehicles) but one aspect that felt worse than the vanilla game was the driving. When playing Super Ultra De- ya know, I'm not gonna say that title every time... when playing SUDR3ARHEEx+A (that really isn't much better) I ended up flipping my vehicle far too often than I ever remembered flipping my vehicles in the main game.
Aside from a few simple glitches and gripes, overall the is a package worth the buy! It takes the Dead Rising 3 gameplay you already love and infuses it with "neko-mimi" and copious amounts of Mtn Dew to give us this deliciously ridiculous gameplay experience that definitely earns the ridiculously long title... what are you waiting for? Get on LIVE and nab Super Ultra Dead Risi- sorry... I really can't do the full title again.
PROS:
+ Satisfyingly ridiculous
+ Fan Service
+ B.B. Hood
+ Fun yet challenging
+ Varied mission objectives
CONS:
- Slight frame rate issues during visual heavy supers
- Driving feels clunkier than main game
